Several issues could be making Office 365 run much slower than this reader’s “old reliable” Office 2003. Also, fixing junk-mail settings for your web-based client may take more than one tweak.
Q: After sticking with Office 2003 for the last decade and a half, I decided to take the jump into Office 365 and installed it earlier this week. But after a few days, I’m seriously considering uninstalling and going back to old reliable Office 2003 because the Office 365 apps are so darn slow.
Word takes two or three minutes to open. I literally click it and walk away from my computer because I can’t stand just waiting and waiting for it to open. Once it finally opens it works, but is a bit sluggish. I never had this issue with 2003.
What do you think? Should I give up and go back to 2003? Or is there something I can do to speed up 365?
I’m running a Lenovo Y-580 laptop with an Intel i7-3610 processor and 8 gigabytes of memory, a 7200-rpm hard drive with 130 gigabytes of free space. My Windows 10 is up to date with all the latest and greatest.
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Read more from Patrick Marshall here >>— Larry Vogel
A: There are quite a few things that could be causing that slow performance. For starters, how fast is your internet connectivity?
While Office 365 is installed locally on your computer, it is designed to work in the cloud. If you’re storing files on the OneDrive cloud storage and your connectivity is slow that could impact your performance.
Another possibility is that your computer is short on available memory. While your computer has 8 gigabytes of physical memory, the file you attached to your email shows only 1.47 gigabytes of available memory.
It may be that other programs or possibly malware are chewing up memory, causing Windows to have to write to “virtual memory,” which means storing application data on your disc drive. That’s a slow process.
There are a number of steps you can take to diagnose just what’s going on and, hopefully, to remedy the problem. Microsoft offers a troubleshooting guide that you can find at: https://seati.ms/office365
Q: For the past few months, my email account keeps labeling anything from Nextdoor as spam. I contacted support for Nextdoor.com and was told my Nextdoor account had been flagged, since my email provider (Outlook) had labeled Nextdoor emails as spam. But a support rep named Seth unflagged it and I again started receiving neighborhood news from Nextdoor; to ensure it didn’t happen again, I added three email addresses for Nextdoor to the safe-senders list of my email account.
However, now even when I’ve finished reading something from Nextdoor and send it to the delete folder, it will end up in the junk folder as spam. When I’ve tried to contact Outlook about this, the support rep Yamini S. hasn’t been any help. His emails originate from support@olcsupport.mail.helpshift.com.
I use Hotmail.com (via Outlook). I’ve also lost some other news sources delivered to my inbox. It’s as if Microsoft doesn’t want to support Hotmail. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
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— Terry Parkhurst, Seattle
A: Judging from the email address you’re using to seek support, I wouldn’t be pointing a finger of blame at Microsoft. HelpShift is a third-party, subscription-support service.
Also, your email provider is apparently not Outlook. Outlook is the client you’re using to access your email provider, which is Hotmail. You could also access those emails through the web-based Hotmail client. The key thing to keep in mind is that both Outlook and Hotmail have junk-mail settings that could be flagging your Nextdoor emails as spam. You might whitelist Nextdoor emails — specifying them as emails you want to receive — in one Outlook but if it’s still being flagged by Hotmail you won’t receive it. You would need to go to the web-based Hotmail client and configure its junk-mail feature as well.